Read THIS THREAD on the Apple FCP forums about this handy feature. Apparently Tom Wolsky (whom I learned A LOT from in the past…and apparently keep learning from) knew about this…but didn’t let us in on the discovery. EDIT: YES HE DID, IN A BOOK ON FCP 3.o THAT HE WROTE QUITE A WHILE BACK. A few people in this thread discovered this feature by accident…because they don’t do the standard editing this of putting IN and OUT points when replacing footage. So this works because of doing something you shouldn’t normally be doing.

What is it? Transition preservation…replacing a shot sandwiched between two other shots, with dissolves between all of them. This DOES NOT work with Overwrite…only REPLACE…and only under certain circumstances. Instead of typing this all out, I am going to show you:

EDIT: OK, apparently this is nothing new. This has been a feature for a while (the “no IN OUT required thing), and I only now just stumbled upon it. I have always worked under the assumption that IN and OUT points were required for this task, and they really hadn’t.

Comments

This is nothing new. That is how a replace edit works. It uses the existing edit points on the timeline and syncs to the two playheads. That has been how a replace edit works on an Avid for as far back as I can remember. I was first shown this in an Avid class in 1997. I’ve been doing this in FCP as long as I’ve been using FCP, because well, that’s just how one should expect a replace edit to work. You are replacing a clip with another clip, not changing edit points, merely replacing content.

I know this is how a replace edit works. But I have ALWAYS put IN and OUT points to indicate where I wanted the edit to go. I had NO IDEA that FCP nor Avid didn’t need me to do that. That they’d know based on where the playhead was marked. Overwrite doesn’t know where you want the OUT point to be unless you indicate it…the IN can be where the playhead is.

In FACT, I do know that when I was cutting on Avid Meridians that unless I had IN and OUT points marked, it wouldn’t replace. The whole point is that this works only when there are no IN and OUT points…when you have them, there’s an issue. And that to me, is very very odd.

Trust me on this one, I’ve had replace edit mapped to N on every Avid I’ve cut on for the past 12 years. That’s MCSoft, Nitris, Adrenaline, Meridien, and AVBV (NuBus). You have never needed in and out points to do a replace edit.

I trust you. DAMN…must be me and my stupid reliance on IN and OUT points. Never told different.

So this is not a breakthrough at all. Now I feel like a heel.

Still leaving this up though…for those LIKE ME who didn’t know.

Scott Simmons

December 8th, 2009 at 1:05 PM

While Replace Edit has behaved like this in FCP for a long time I would say to definitely leave the post up as there’s tons of editors out there who have no idea how Replace Edit works … I have a feeling you’ll be educating quite a few people with it.

I use Replace Edit some … not a lot. The functionality IMHO that really works wonders is Avid’s Sync Point Editing. That’s what I really miss in FCP when working on music videos.